1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to search in a database and more specifically to voice searches based on prosody.
2. Introduction
The heart of a voice-enabled search system is its ability to quickly and accurately recognize the meaning of a user query, whether the meaning is express or implied. Only after the true meaning of the query is captured by the system can it appropriately respond with a relevant answer. However, a user's query directed at a machine is often curt, incomplete, incoherent, or inconsistent in parts. One approach to this problem is to ask the user to repeat the query. This approach, however, may inconvenience or annoy the user as he or she would have to repeat everything that he or she says multiple times until the machine finally understands it. More importantly, the repeated query may not even be necessarily more usable than the first one. Another approach is to ask follow-up questions to clarify the meaning of the query. This approach is also problematic because, again, the user may be inconvenienced and annoyed and it takes extra time to get additional information out of the user.